


MLPMichael: Origins

by rage_quitter



Series: Immortal FAHC Origin Stories [5]
Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: Fake AH Crew, Graphic Description of War, Immortality, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-24
Updated: 2015-06-24
Packaged: 2018-04-05 21:27:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4195530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rage_quitter/pseuds/rage_quitter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Landmines were the worst.</p>
            </blockquote>





	MLPMichael: Origins

**Author's Note:**

> TW: This gets a little graphic in the beginning and middle.

The year was 1917. America declared war on Germany.

Michael Jones was twenty six years old. He worked odd jobs raising money to pay for his engineering courses. He was a brilliant young man, and, as any good patriot looking to earn more money, he signed up for the draft.

Michael’s training was rushed. They needed soldiers, and they needed them fast. It took barely a month of drills and marching and learning the ranks and obedience before they were taking his squad off to learn specific duties, things like shooting and caring for a gun, army crawling, how to use a gas mask and a turret. He crammed as much memory as he could into his head before they handed him a uniform, a rifle, and stuck him on a boat to France.

The enthusiasm he’d had during training fizzled out when he saw the conditions. The first thing he noticed was the smell. Even from the back lines he could smell the rotting corpses lost in No Man’s Land. The trenches stretched for miles, full of mud and puddles and miserable soldiers. It was cold and wet and he was suddenly lost and afraid.

The French were relieved to see fresh faces. The Americans offered them hope. The English were less enthused but glad for the support. Michael was shunted to the front lines. There he met a Frenchman named Jacques who spoke English with a thick accent. He made fun of him for his stereotypical name until Jacques made fun of his common name, saying half the Americans there were Michaels and the other half were Johns. From that they formed a sort of friendship.

Michael avoided the medical tents. The smell of sickness was overwhelming and the groans and sobbing of dying men gave him chills.

They hid in the ditches that day. Jacques showed him how things went. The soldiers were tired, but overall nice to the new guy, if sympathetic, which Michael bristled at. Jacques laughed him off and got him a bedroll and showed him the crevice in the wall were he could sleep that night.

Through the night, only one German nearby tried to sneak across, and the shot from the sniper woke Michael from his already fitful sleep. The next day was duller than the first, and Michael could sense a monotony in the movements of the soldiers around him. He was starting to regret signing up for this.

Night dawned once more. Jacques was asleep, and Michael was keeping watch with a few other young soldiers. The man beside him, Marc, couldn’t be more than nineteen. He spoke only French, but another man, an Englishman named John, translated for them and joined in their conversation. They chatted about their respective countries and how the food was (horrible) and how the weather was (horrible) and about their families.

It was around one in the morning when Michael spotted movement over the muddy, barbed wire and land mine infested no man’s land. He nudged John on the arm and pointed it out. John squinted into the darkness and barked to the other men on watch. They waited, weapons loaded and fingers beside the triggers.

Suddenly there was a scuffle and several men burst out from the shadows, guns blasting. Michael raised his gun and turned his head to ask for orders. He found himself eye level with Marc.

Marc looked afraid, like a child. He opened his mouth, as if to speak. A loud crack split the air. Marc’s face exploded. Blood sprayed on to Michael, who gaped in horror and stumbled back as Marc’s body collapsed.

Jacques woke up sometime during the skirmish and grabbed onto Michael’s shoulders, yanking him down. “Michael, Michael, _est-ce que tu es blessé_? (are you hurt?) Get a hold of yourself, Michael!” Jacques looked Michael in the face, eyebrows furrowed in concern, and cursed. “ _Allons_ , (come on) you’re in shock, you need to see a medic.” He dragged Michael backwards, shouting to the other men to move out of the way. He muttered to Michael, or maybe to himself, “ _Tout va bien, tu vas bien_ (everything is fine, you're okay). _Merde, merde! Tu seras bien,_ Michael. (Shit, shit! You will be okay),

They made it to a medical tent and Jacques called for a nurse. An English woman came over. “What happened?” She demanded. “Is he hurt?”

“Non, I think he’s in shock. He just arrived the other day and saw an acquaintance shot and killed right beside him. That’s- that’s the other man’s blood.”

The nurse nodded, her face moving from immediate guard to motherly concern. “And you?”

“I’m fine,” Jacques replied.

“Good. Get on, I’ll take care of him.” The nurse took over for Jacques.

The entire ordeal was over Michael’s head. He was underwater, voices muffled and distant and not important. He saw a man die—the image of Marc’s head bursting like a melon replayed over and over in his mind. He felt sick, he didn’t feel real. Nothing existed right now.

Outside of Michael’s disoriented brain, the nurse was trying to revive him. Another nurse, an older lady, joined her. With a thick cockney accent she asked, “Wha’s wrong wi’ ‘im?”

“He’s got shellshock. Saw his friend die, he’s new here. First time he’s seen someone die, I’d bet.” The nurse frowned. “It’s hard, seeing someone die. It never gets easier. Just easier to hide.”

The other nurse nodded. “Yeah, true. Now, ‘old on, I got the thing for this.”

The first nurse huffed as the other searched a medicine bag. “Your silly unconventional ways…”

“They ain’t not worked before, eh?” She pulled out a small bag and opened it under Michael’s nose.

The strong smell hit Michael like a brick to the nose. He was jarred back into reality with a gasp and a coughing fit.

The second nurse, satisfied, replaced the bag. “Smellin’ salts, work every time.”

The first nurse calmly checked Michael’s vitals and asked him questions. Who he was, his rank, his life at home. Dizzy and shaken, Michael answered her.

It took a day for him to recover, and the nightmares never left.

Within a few days he was back on the front lines. Most of the days he thought boredom would get him before the enemy would. There was nothing to do but talk with the other soldiers, play cards, and gamble. Technically that last part was illegal, but no one really cared. He learned a little French from Jacques and John, although the latter was much quieter and reserved with his friend gone.

When there were fights, they were small. Teams of two to six were sent from one side to the other. They didn’t always make it over. It was a little easier the second time Michael saw someone die. He held his, albeit cold and flavorless, lunch, at least. That wasn’t the case the first time Michael killed someone.

The few skirmishes were insignificant but brutal and bloody. Michael grew used to the smell of blood and decay and slept through the sounds of sobbing and screaming.

Four weeks and two days after his arrival, Michael was ordered to join a team and go across No Man’s Land and directly attack the Germans. He had never been so terrified in his life.

Jacques, at least, would be going with him, which relieved him a little. Jacques had been on a couple of raids before and survived. Michael asked John to send a letter home to his family if he died.

They waited in strained silence for night to set in. Michael’s knuckles were white as he clutched his rifle and he swallowed bile. For my country, he thought. The greatest sacrifice, to protect my people, to protect the French and the English and all of the world. But he wasn’t sure if he really believed that. It was all the hope he had left to hold on to, though.

When it was dark, with only smoke-screened moonlight and the stars and fires of the camps illuminating the earth, Michael’s team, already geared up, began to creep across No Man’s land. It was cold and damp and Michael’s grip was too tight on his gun and his equipment was heavy. It was so still, so quiet, the only sounds the light rattling of their equipment, their boots splashing softly in puddles, whether of blood or muddy water, Michael didn’t want to know, as they skirted around barbed wire and the small mounds of earth where the land mines were buried. Michael hardly dared to even breathe.

They’d barely gone two thirds of the way, the German front line in sight, when they heard a shout. They froze at the sound of yelling in German.

A shot rang out, and one of Michael’s teammates crumpled with a cry clutching his stomach as the bullet ripped through his gut.

Jacques swore in French and grabbed Michael’s arm to pull him back. “Retreat!”

Michael, his heart pounding, whirled around, head ducked, and ran with his team back to the relative safety, scrambling around wire and land mines. A bullet whizzed past Michael’s head and he dove to one side in panic.

He huddled on the ground for a few seconds before shakily standing up. Fuck, fuck, where was Jacques, where was his team?! He spun in a circle, searching for them, his glasses were foggy and dirty and he couldn’t see, it was dark, where, where—

There they were! Jacques was motioning for the others to go ahead, standing still himself as he looked around, looking for Michael, too afraid and too smart to call for him and risk alerting the enemy. Michael stepped towards him, intent on catching up, and Jacques spotted him. The Frenchman mouthed something, but Michael was the worst at lip reading. He clutches his gun to his chest with one hand and his hat with the other and started to jog towards Jacques. Then he felt his foot catch.

That fucking barbed wire.

He tumbled to the ground and realized, too late, that he’d fallen squarely on top of a mound of dirt. The world vanished almost instantly, in a mere moment of agonizing pain, as he was torn to pieces by the explosion.

Some time later, Michael came to with a groan. He was lying face down in no man’s land, his clothes torn up but his equipment in fairly decent condition. His dog tags were cold against his chest. He sat up and brushed the mud off of his face. It was still very dark and his glasses were cracked.

“What the fuck?” he muttered. Slowly, he stood up, instinctively keeping his head ducked. Did he pass out? He was most definitely alive, so the land mine thing… that must’ve been some crazy dream. Uncertainly, he turned around, squinting toward each line. He couldn’t tell which side was which, but he really did not want to stand around in a wet, barren wasteland of corpse, barbed wire, and land mines. Well, he thought, fifty percent chance that I’ll be fine. He started walking towards one side.

By the time he was close enough to hear the soldiers speaking German, he was already spotted. The sounds of a dozen guns being aimed at him and readied to fire chilled his blood and he stopped. Could he retreat? When he took a step back he heard safeties click off. Guess not. He held up his hands in surrender, and saw the silvery scars on his arms when his torn sleeves fell.

Michael was taken prisoner by the Germans. It was not a pleasant experience. He was stuck in a camp for two weeks, the only thing to keep him comfort during those times being the dog tags they let him keep on a cord around his neck. They then sent him back to the front lines to dig trenches. He learned bits and pieces of German, and his temper got him black eyes and nights of hunger more often than not. At some point, the cold and the wet got to him, and he spent three days laying in the mud, shivering violently and writing in agony as infection ate at his insides. At some ungodly hour of the morning on the fourth day, he died.

This time, he woke up near a small French village, just over a mile from where he’d been digging, from the stars.

There was no mistaking it. He’d died. And before, he thought as he stared at the silvery markings on his arms that arched randomly over his torso and upper legs, he’d definitely been blown up by that land mine. He’d returned to life twice now.

Fuck this, he thought. Fuck the war, fuck the Germans, fuck everyone. It was too much. He was a religious man, but the lord returning a man to life, not once, but twice, when hundreds of other men died every day? A man like Michael, no less? He could think of no explanation.

The grumbling of his stomach drove the thought from his head. Who cares, he decided. He was starving. Weak, he stumbled to the little village and knocked on the door of a house. With his remedial French, he asked the family for help. They were happy to help when he told them he was not German, but a friend, escaped from being a German prisoner. As poor as they were, they cooked him a meal and gave him clean clothes to wear. He slept for several hours, and when he awoke he thanked the family for their kindness. He asked for a few supplies, a small bag with a blanket, some food, and a knife, and left to wander the French countryside.

Eventually he ended up in Paris, where he fell in with the wrong people immediately and taught himself and learned from other street rats how to fight dirty, how to pickpocket, how to beg. His French got better and soon he was speaking it fluently. He spent a year there, immersed in the intricate politics of the dangerous homeless population of France and making few friends with his foul mouth and bad temper. His empathy, already weakened from war, waned through the year, fluctuating with his hunger and budget. He had no choice but to care for himself over anyone else to survive.

Finally he had saved up enough money to buy himself a ticket back to America. He nearly cried when he saw Lady Liberty.

He traveled throughout the Northeast, avoiding the law and sticking to under the table jobs and eventually mercenary work. He tried, at first, to keep track of how many times he died, but with his growing apathy for life as a thing he didn’t need to worry about, he lost count.

Ironically enough, he found in himself a love for explosions and fire. Whether it was a previously unrecognized pyroomania or a side effect of literally dying in an explosion, Michael did not know nor care. He learned to make explosives with simple ingredients and stockpiled them in various hidden locations all over the country as he traveled.

Time stretched on. He didn’t know when he realized that he didn’t age. He ran moonshine during the roaring twenties and into the Great Depression. He avoided the draft for the Second World War—being legally dead helped a lot. The greaser fashion called him in the fifties, despite his curly red hair violently fighting it, and he fell in love with leather jackets. He didn’t directly join in peace and civil rights protests when they came up, but definitely supported them from the sidelines and elections because the opposition usually sucked majorly. He preferred to stick to the Northeast, near his home in New Jersey, but his accent was long since lost, with only inflections of certain words to give it away.

In the early 1980s he was living in New York City. He had an apartment, nothing spectacular, though with his illegally amassed fortune stashed in safehouses and buried throughout the nation, he could afford something much nicer. For now he was working as an electrician, as a cover, and at night was Mogar, the most dangerous and well-sought mercenary on the streets. He never affiliated past monetary gain from gangs, and made it clear to the gang and whoever he would be killing, if his silence were not bought.

It was on one night, on his way home from his legal job, that he heard two consecutive shots from the same pistol a few blocks away. Michael hesitated only a moment. It was common in this part of the city. No skin off Michael’s back.

That is, until he saw a man materialize on a bus stop bench. It was so fast he’d have missed it if he blinked, but it looked like he was built from silvery dust. Michael gaped in shock at him. He lay still for a few seconds before his dark eyes bugged wide open and he jerked upright. His shirt was covered in blood, just as Michael’s clothes were ruined when he died. He couldn’t have been more than twenty three, of Latino descent, with his glasses held together with tape.

“Uh…” Michael said. “Are you… okay?”

“Um, yeah, I’m fine,” the guy answered, not sounding completely confident.

Michael looked at the guy’s bloody chest. The guy looked down, too, and blanched. “Oh. Oh fuck. Oh god.”

“Hey, hey, calm down,” Michael said. “What happened?” He had to find out if it was true, if he wasn’t alone like this.

“I—I don’t know, I just—that guy shot me!” His voice was full of confusion and anger. “How am I alive?!”

“Those shots, that was you?”

“That… yeah. How long ago was that?”

“A few minutes ago. Jesus…” Michael shook his head. “I—all this time, I thought I was the only one…”

“The fuck are you talking about?”

“Look at your chest.” Michael tugged at his own collar as example.

“What.”

“Seriously, just look.” If he’d been shot and come back, like Michael, he’d have scars, right?

The guy pulled the collar of his shirt away and squinted down. “What the fuck…”

So he did have scars! Michael laughed, incredulous. “Holy shit, kid, welcome back to life.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I don’t either!” He held out a hand. “I’m Michael Jones.”

Ray took his hand and Michael helped him up. “Ray Narvaez, Jr.”

“Boy, do I have a lot to tell you.”

Ray looked starved, so Michael handed him his jacket (“You’re covered in blood, dude, come on, it’s not that cold, I’ll be fine, you need it more”), took him to a nearby fast food place, bought him all the food he wanted, and they sat down to eat and talk. Michael showed him his own scars and explained that he’d died a long time ago. Ray, with a mouthful of food, asked him if he aged at all, and when he received the answer of nope, twenty six forever, he asked if he’d seen the rise and fall of kings and eras and ages and Michael shrugged as he chewed on a fry.

“Not much older than like, a really old dude. I, uh, stepped on a land mine in World War One. I’ve seen some shit, yeah, but not like, tons and tons of shit.”

They stuck together, and Michael eventually brought him on mercenary work with him. Ray was an amazing shot once he’d learned to shoot a real gun the right way, one of the best gunmen Michael had ever met in his life, and he’d met many. Especially for a guy so inexperienced. Michael knew Ray was sending off parts of his earnings, but never asked. It wasn’t his business, and it didn’t affect them at all. He later learned it was Ray’s mother.

New York was getting tiresome for Michael in the 2000s. Ray suggested they move. Michael decided, fuck it, across the entire country we go. They went to Los Santos and fell in love with the place, as corrupt and shitty as it was, just perfect for misfit mercenaries.

A crew hired them, three people, and on the job the British fucker got shot. Michael panicked—he wasn’t prepared for that! Then a bullet split open his skull.

When he returned, he was next to the British dude, who was just as surprised as Michael. Geoff offered Ray and Michael a job right when he figured out what had happened. The two agreed.

Crew life fit Michael perfectly, he found. The money, the jobs, the weapons, the thrills, everything was bigger and grander and more dangerous and he loved it.

Jack was the only one to ask about the dog tags he kept around his neck. “Just a memory,” he told her. “One I don’t want to forget.”

**Author's Note:**

> The fifth origin. More on immortal-fahc.tumblr.com.  
> I'd also like to thank FrozenLawyers for the fixing of my French!


End file.
